The Return to Downtowns versus Jewish Suburban Infrastructure

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The Return to Downtowns versus Jewish Suburban Infrastructure

In recent years, there has been a growth in the idea of the importance and value of downtowns and mixed-use walkable neighborhoods. But at least one population has some difficulty moving back to urban centers: religious Jews. From an article of mine in The Atlantic Cities:

Historically, America’s religious Jews lived in dense neighborhoods deep in the heart of cities. And this made a lot of sense. Due to prohibitions against driving on the Sabbath and the desire to be in close proximity to one’s synagogue (in addition to being near any kosher establishments), living in dense, walkable neighborhoods was highly desirable.

But with increased affluence and a desire for the American Dream—a house on one’s own plot of land, a car, among other accouterments of middle-class life—Orthodox Jews experienced their own mass movement to the suburbs over the past 50 years. In fact, the historian Arthur Hertzberg has estimated that one in three Jews left cities for suburbia between the years 1945 and 1965, which is a much higher rate than that of the overall American population. While this is not true for all stripes of observant Jews (the ultra-Orthodox still congregate in dense neighborhoods such as those in Brooklyn, for example), many modern Orthodox Jews have made this geographic transition. (Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at Queens College, explored these trends in great detail in a 1999 paper titled, “Orthodox Jews, the City and the Suburb.”)

Despite all this renewed interest in downtowns today, many Orthodox communities are stuck in suburbia, and it comes down to one major factor: the "eruv."

I discuss the importance of walkable Jewish neighborhoods, embodied in the idea of the eruv (check out Wyatt Cenac's discussion of the eruv as well). But in the end, it comes down to the following factor:

Ultimately, this new excitement with moving to city centers is happening at a completely different speed than that at which religious infrastructure is developed. The construction of eruvin often require years of negotiation with local governments, the Jewish community, sometimes even the electric company (though many power lines are underground in downtowns, making the problem even worse), and can only be constructed relatively slowly.

As Yoni Appelbaumnoted: "The broader lesson here is that the infrastructure of community is difficult to relocate, making families less mobile."